Injured Thistledown colt Ryan gets surgery, rehab chance at Denali Stud

Ryan’s injury at Thistledown could have been a dead end. Instead, the colt was quickly moved into a chain of care built for horses with a chance to live and work again, not just survive the immediate crisis.

The injury came during morning training on April 21, when Ryan sustained a carpal slab fracture. By the next day, he was at Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Alex Curtiss performed surgery. The operation went well, and the horse’s prognosis was strong enough that his future shifted from a possible end-of-life decision to rehabilitation and, eventually, a second career.

What happened after the surgery is the part the industry has spent years trying to get right. Brook Ledge Horse Transportation moved Ryan free of charge, and he arrived at Denali Stud in Paris, Kentucky, just two days after the injury. There, the farm donated stall space through the HISA Equine Recovery Foundation’s Empty Stall Challenge, a program built to find unused stalls nationwide for injured horses that need time and management to heal.

Ryan is listed on HERF’s horses page as rehabilitating at Denali Stud, with an excellent prognosis for life and pasture soundness and a good prognosis for a second career as a riding horse. That is the point of the foundation’s model: immediate veterinary treatment, rehabilitation and placement decisions that are driven by prognosis, not by the owner’s bank account or the logistics of where a horse can go next.

HERF says it focuses on injuries with strong recovery outcomes, including slab fractures and condylar fractures, because those are the cases where treatment can realistically change the outcome. The foundation launched its pilot program in early 2026 in the Mid-Atlantic, Arkansas, Illinois and Ohio, and it has a goal of onboarding all 41 HISA Thoroughbred tracks within 12 months. HISA announced HERF on December 10, 2025, saying it was meant to help prevent unnecessary euthanasia when surgery and rehab are likely to succeed.

That is why Ryan matters beyond one horse. His case shows a working aftercare pipeline, from track injury to surgery to transport to farm placement, with the next chapter still open. Dr. Curtiss, a board-certified ACVS surgeon since 2020, handled the repair. Denali, an 800-acre nursery that says more than 500 stakes horses have come through its program, will handle the patience. For a colt hurt on a Monday at Thistledown, that combination is the difference between being written off and being given a chance.